Enlightenment and German Idealism: Kant, Rousseau and Hegel
What this domain tests
This block covers the Enlightenment's political and moral turn and the idealist response to Kant. You must explain Rousseau's state of nature, general will and social contract; Kant's Copernican revolution, synthetic a priori knowledge, categories, phenomena and noumena, and the categorical imperative; and Hegel's dialectic, historical reason, master-slave relation and critique of the thing-in-itself.
Core rules and concepts
- Rousseau: natural goodness and perfectibility distinguish humans from animals; inequality arises through property and comparison. The social contract aims at the general will, which concerns the common good and is not the sum of particular wills. Freedom is obedience to a law one gives oneself.
- Kant: experience is structured by forms of intuition (space, time) and pure concepts (categories); synthetic a priori judgments are possible because the object of experience is constituted in part by our cognition. We know phenomena, not things in themselves. The categorical imperative tests maxims for universalizability and treats humanity as an end in itself; autonomy is the ground of dignity.
- Hegel: thought and being are not separated by an unknowable remainder; the absolute is reached through dialectical development. Self-consciousness arises through recognition in the master-slave struggle; history is rational in retrospect, and Aufhebung cancels, preserves and elevates earlier stages.
Worked example
Test the maxim 'I will make a false promise when in difficulty.' Universalize it: a practice of promise-keeping could not survive universal deception, because the institution of promising would collapse. The maxim is contradictory in conception, so it fails the first formulation. The second formulation adds that using the promisee merely as a means violates humanity as an end. Notice that the test is formal and a priori; consequences are irrelevant to the contradiction. Contrast a hypothetical imperative, which depends on a desired end, with the categorical imperative, which binds unconditionally.
Traps
Kant is not a subjective idealist who says anything goes; the categories are universal conditions. Rousseau's general will is not majority opinion or the aggregation of private interests. Hegel's dialectic is not the mechanical formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which is a later textbook simplification. Do not claim Hegel makes the state the highest value without qualification, or that 'absolute knowledge' means omniscience.